A week or so ago, I talked about how I might have killed my Framework 13 by dumping a full mug of coffee over it while it was running.
In that last post I explained how I'd stripped the laptop down and was waiting for some isopropyl alcohol (IPA) to be delivered so I could more thoroughly clean it. Well dear reader, the IPA turned up, I cleaned it as best I could, and left it for 24 hours to dry off.
The next day I came back to it, re-assembled it and hit the power button with a fair amoun...
From the tangle in your computer cord to the mess your cat made of your knitting basket, knots are everywhere in daily life. They also pervade science, showing up in loops of DNA, intertwined polymer strands, and swirling water currents. And within pure mathematics, knots are the key to many central questions in topology. Yet knot theorists still struggle with the most basic of questions: how to…
Source From the tangle in your computer cord to the mess your cat made of your knitting basket,...
I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and every time I read one of these “I woke up with a USD 18k bill in my Cloud account” articles, I am reminded about how fucking stupid—and predatory—this whole industry can be.
The ability to set hard spending caps should be required by law. I think that’s another issue the EU should decide to tackle at some point. If I know I have a budget available, there should be an option for me to configure your service so that you don’t allo...
When I was working on the WASM backend for my Scheme compiler ,
I ran into several tricky situations with debugging generated WASM code. It
turned out that Chrome has a very capable WASM debugger in its DevTools, so in
this brief post I want to share how it can be used.
The setup and harness
I'll be using an example from my wasm-wat-samples project for this post. In fact,
everything is already in place in the gc-print-scheme-pairs
sample. This sample shows how to construct Scheme-like...
I accidentally published a few hundred drafts yesterday. I was messing with a new Hugo build pipeline, and symlinked something where it shouldn’t be. It was less destructive than getting the if and of wrong in dd(1) , but it still wasn’t ideal. I heard you like infinite recursion, so I…!
Only one made it through to the RSS feed I think, and it was my evolving thoughts on Australia’s teen social media ban which is proving much harder to write and cite than I expected. Who would hav...
The medieval Church wasn’t just (or primarily) a religious institution:
it also provided civil infrastructure to large parts of Europe.
Monasteries preserved and copied the manuscripts that contained
the accumulated knowledge of the civilization.
Other parts of the Church maintained the hospitals and schools,
and operated the record-keeping systems that kept track of births, deaths, marriages,
and property transfers—the events on which legal and economic life depended.
What the Church got ...
Shield AI selected by U.S. Navy to compete for $800M in ISR services with V-BAT
shield.ai
WASHINGTON — (April 20, 2026) — Shield AI announced today its selection by the United States Navy to provide contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) services in support of naval and joint force operations.
Under the Navy’s initiative to expand and modernize ISR capabilities, Shield AI will compete for up to $800 million in task orders alongside other selected industry partners, delivering persistent ISR using its V-BAT v...
The fastest way to match characters on ARM processors?
lemire.me
Consider the following problem. Given a string, you must match all of the ASCII white-space characters ( \t , \n , \r , and the space) and some characters important in JSON ( : , , , [ , ] , { , } ). JSON is a text-based data format used for web services. A toy JSON document looks as follows.
{
"name" : "Alice" ,
"age" : 30 ,
"email" : "alice@example.com" ,
"tags" : [ "developer" , "python" , "open-source" ],
"active" : true
}
We want to solve...
… everything.
I need to know less, but I know more.
Trying to cultivate a life which allows me to know less while still participating in society requires me to know more and do more than simply laying back and passively allowing the unending flood of information to drown me.
Please note that we are all being drowned.
What is it that is drowning us?
Information and misinformation. Part of the drowning is the effort required to try to distinguish between the two. You’re try...
Gimkit cosmetics are visual items players earn by answering questions in 2D game modes. They cover character skins called Gims, particle trails, and lobby stickers. None of them affect scores or gameplay speed. Gimkit released the first cosmetics on April 12, 2022, and the system has grown steadily since then with Packs added in March 2025.
What Are Gimkit Cosmetics and How Do They Work?
Cosmetics work through XP earned in Gimkit 2D game modes . Every 1,000 XP moves a player up one level, ...
We’re ramping up again to launch the Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026 and in this post I make the case for a new web site builder can layer itself on top of your existing projects as a progressive enhancement. Infrastructure as progressive enhancement! We’re ramping up again to launch the Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026 and in this post I make the case for a new web site builder can layer itself on top of your existing...
My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger. My experience on a five day alpinism course to the Grossvenediger.
Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar . This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye. This edition contains 118 blips, each briefly describing our impressions of one of these elements.
As we would expect, the radar is dominated by AI-oriented topics. Part of this is revisiting familiar ground with LLM-assisted eyes:
An...
Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept in the realm of databases. It's still of the relational abstraction. Or can be.
As an example, say we have this data:
data = [
{ "name" : "Smudge" , "colour" : "black" },
{ "name" : "Sissel" , "colour" : "grey" },
{ "name" : "Hamlet" , "colour" : "black" }
]
This represents a tab...
How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects. How to generate and sign with SLH-DSA very quickly, with only mild side effects.
I've spent the last 2 years building and interviewing candidates for AI Engineering roles. So I've been fortunate enough to watch the career track evolve from being a fringe amorphous role fueled by hype to a growing discipline in and of itself. AI Engineering as a term is still pretty fuzzy but for the purposes of this blog post, I define an AI Engineer as an engineer whose primary expertise is developing systems and solutions which integrate AI platforms and stacks. It's an intersection of sk...
I like to walk quickly. One of my childhood friends did, too. Whenever I reflect on the pace at which I walk, I think of the times when we tried to walk as fast as possible. My friend was much more athletic than I – with longer legs, too – so they often had the edge in walking speed. I loved trying to be quick anyway. Now, I have the joy of walking bringing back those memories. When I notice something out in the world, I often stop in my tracks, eager to see or hear as much of what I have no...
Articles on Chandrayaan 1, India’s first Moon mission
jatan.spaceChandrayaan 1 spacecraft illustration. Image: TeamIndus Looking back at Chandrayaan 1 and forward to Artemis How NASA and India discovered water on our Moon Interviewing Chandrayaan 1’s Mission Director How Chandrayaan 1 viewed a solar eclipse from the Moon Tangent: Kids in South Korea and a Moon mission
Like my efforts to provide free...
Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing
simonwillison.net
Anthropic today quietly (as in silently , no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page , which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it's already reverted ):
The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $20...
Is it time to start burning down datacenters?
Some people think so. An Indianapolis city council member had his house recently shot up for supporting datacenters, and Sam Altman’s home was firebombed (and then shot ) shortly afterwards. People from all sides of the argument are sounding the alarm about imminent violence.
The obvious historical comparison is Luddism , the 19th-century phenomenon where English weavers and knitters destroyed the machines that were automating their w...
Michael Rabin passed away on April 14, 2026 at the age of 94. (Scott Aaronson has also blogged about his passing, see here .) I had many points to make about him; however, the first one got so long that I will just do that one for today's blog post. Rabin is an extremely well-rounded \(\ldots\) computer scientist? Computer scientist seems too narrow, and the point of this point is that he was well rounded. So I will start this thought again. The following is an extremely important questi...
It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed Minimum Income) rural study counties so Mercer County, WV, my Dad's county, went first in October 2025. I knew dad was close to the end, and sure enough, that was the last time I ever saw him. You can kinda sorta meet my dad on this page, if you want to. Why Pledge to Share the Amer...
This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026.
I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months.
I then recorded myself giving a version of this talk with MacWhisper , and transcribed it with Whisper locally. This part took 45 minutes (the total time of my practice run.)
Then, I ran it through Gemini Flash 2.5 running in Pi to break into paragraphs. I also had Gemini break up my slid...
